A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors

My appreciation for the 3rd installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise skyrocketed after watching Christopher Nolan's Inception. Yes, it takes itself less seriously. Hell no, it never received any Oscar buzz. Yes, it's outright cartoonish at times, And, no, you can't convince me I've lost my mind for thinking this (if I'm insane you wouldn't be able to win an argument with me anyway). A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors is actually the more sensible, and even more creative film. Re-watching it again recently, I was in awe of its inventiveness with dream logic, and its surreal special effects and production design. It also establishes an idea within two minutes that Nolan completely fails at with 148: that death within a dream has high consequences.

Nightmare 3 ignores whatever happened in Part Two, and so it's not required viewing beforehand (though none of it will make a bit of sense to those who never saw the original Nightmare on Elm Street). The film opens with a teenage artist named Kristen (Patricia Arquette in her first feature-length role). She's mixing coffee grounds with Coke to stay awake, and building a model of a certain creepy house on Elm Street she keeps visiting in her dreams. Soon enough, we're in it with her after she falls asleep, and she's attacked by a razor-gloved, dream-stalking serial killer known as Freddy Krueger. She wakes up in her mother's bathroom holding a razor with slit wrists.